In this episode of our predictions series, we consider the evolving nature of Cloud, across architecture, cost management, and, indeed, the lower levels of infrastructure. We asked our analysts Dana Hernandez, Ivan McPhee, Jon Collins, Whit Walters, and William McKnight for their thoughts. 

Jon: We’re seeing a maturing of thinking around architecture, not just with cloud computing but across technology provision. Keep in mind that what we know as Cloud is still only 25% of the overall space – the other three quarters are on-premise or hosted in private data centers. It’s all got to work together as a single notional platform, or at least, the more accurate we can make this, the more efficient we can be.

Whilst the keyword may be ‘hybrid’, I expect to see a shift from hybrid environments by accident, towards hybrid by design – actively making decisions based on performance, cost, and indeed governance areas such as sovereignty. Cost management will continue to catalyze this trend, as illustrated by FinOps. 

Dana: FinOps is evolving, with many companies considering on-prem or moving workloads back from the Cloud. At FinOpsX, companies were looking at blended costs of on-prem and Cloud. Oracle has now joined the big three, Microsoft, Google, and AWS, and it’ll be interesting to see who else will jump in.

Jon: Another illustration is repatriation, moving workloads away from the Cloud and back on-premise.

William: Yes, repatriation is accelerating, but Cloud providers might respond by 2025, likely through more competitive pricing and technical advancements that offer greater flexibility and security. We’re still heavily moving to the Cloud, and repatriation might take a few years to slow down. 

Whit: The vendor response to repatriation has been interesting. Oracle with Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), for example, is undercutting competitors with their pricing model, but there’s skepticism—clients worry Oracle might increase costs later through licensing issues. 

Jon: We’re also seeing historically pure-play Cloud providers move to an acceptance of hybrid models, even though they probably wouldn’t say that out loud. AWS’ Outposts on-premise cloud offering, for example, can now work with local storage from NetApp, and it’s likely this type of partnership will accelerate. I maintain that “Cloud” should be seen primarily as an architectural construct around dynamic provisioning and elastic scaling, and secondarily around who the provider – recognizing that hosting companies can do a better job of resilience. Organizations need to put architecture first.

Ivan: We’ll also see more cloud-native tools to manage those workloads. For instance, on the SASE/SSE side, companies like Cato Networks are seeing success because people don’t want to install physical devices across the network. We also see this trend in NDR with companies like Lumu Technologies, where security solutions are cloud-native rather than on-premises. 

Cloud-native solutions like Cato Networks and Lumu Technologies have more pricing flexibility than those tied to hardware components. They will be better positioned to adjust pricing to drive adoption and growth than traditional on-premises solutions. Some vendors are exploring value-based pricing, considering factors like customer business value to get into strategic accounts. This could be an exciting shift as we move into the future.